Schubert 'Trout' Quintet

摘要

Growing up in a one-room apartment in an overcrowded district northwest of the Ring, pupil then assistant to his schoolteacher father, Schubert was Viennese born and bred, a city boy with even more reason than Beethoven to seek pleasure and solace in the surrounding countryside. Lacking time or resources for more refined pursuits, Schubert in his early 20s relaxed principally by drinking (coffee and alcohol, both to excess), smoking (likewise) and walking. In the early summer of 1819, Schubert and his friend the singer Johann Michael Vogl left Vienna for a trip to Upper Austria. They visited the Benedictine monastery of Kremsmunster and then walked on to Vogl's birthplace, the town of Steyr, where they found lodging at the home of an acquaintance, Sylvester Paumgartner. It was Paumgartner, an amateur cellist, who suggested to Schubert that he compose a quintet, and especially some variations on his song Die Forelle ('The Trout', from 1817) which had become a favourite among the composer's circle of friends. Schubert set to work in haste, to judge from formal aspects of the finished Quintet such as the slow movement - 60 bars of music heard twice, the second time simply transposed and tailed with the briefest of codas - and the repeat-heavy outer movements.